Apple Unveils 64-Bit G5 Macintoshes

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SAN FRANCISCO–Apple ushered in the world of 64-bit computing to its Macintosh line on Monday morning, introducing a new line of G5 Macintoshes to an enthusiastic audience at its Worldwide Developer Conference here.

Although Apple also introduced its latest version of Mac OS X, dubbed “Panther”, Apple’s new hardware crowned Apple as the manufacturer of the world’s fastest personal computer, according to selected real-world and synthetic benchmarks.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs confirmed what sharp-eyed Internet watchers noticed last week on Apple’s web site: the new G5 systems, based on a 64-bit processor from IBM. Within Apple, the marketing glitch now goes by a new term: “premature specification”.

“It was a mistake and it’s true,” Jobs said of the Internet glitch. “But it doesn’t even begin to tell you the story that we’re going to tell you right now. We are delivering today the world’s fastest personal computer.”

Three new 64-bit Apple G5 systems will ship in August, ranging in price from $1,999 to $2,999. The lowest-end system will include a 1.6-GHz G5 processor, 256 Mbytes of PC2700 DDR memory, a 80-Gbyte hard drive, a GeForceFX 5200 card from Nvidia, and a 4X SuperDrive. The midrange model will be identically configured, save for an increase in memory size and speed to 512 Mbytes of PC3200 or DDR400 memory and a larger 160-Gbyte hard drive. Apple’s fastest G5 tower will include a pair of 2.0-GHz G5s, 512 Mbytes of PC3200 memory, a 160-Gbyte hard drive, a Radeon 9600 graphics card, and the 4X SuperDrive.

Although the 64-bit PowerPC processor was designed by IBM, Apple itself designed the system controller. In a surprising advancement for the Apple platform, the front-side processor bus runs at a maximum of 1.0 gigahertz, a significant increase over the 800-MHz front-side bus used by Intel processors. However, the front-side processor bus of the slowest G5 system will run at 800 MHz; the procesor bus of the midrange model will run at 900-MHz. All of the new G5 systems are equipped with AGP 8X and Serial ATA storage connections.

Demonstrating the “legs” of the architecture, Jobs also promised that the G5 will run at 3-GHz by the end of the year.

Unlike past system introductions, where Apple had demonstrated the G4’s alleged superiority thorough optimized Photoshop filters, this time Jobs demonstrated the G5’s capabilities in several real-world applications, comparing them both against a desktop Pentium 4 as well as a pair of Intel Xeon processors. The G5 systems outperformed Intel processors in Photoshop, a 3D rendering application by startup Luxology, and Wolfram Research’s Mathematica application.

Using synthetic SPEC benchmarks, the G5 shines. Using a GCC 3.3 compiler administered by Veritest, the G5 scored 836 on the SPECint benchmark but 840 on the SPECfp benchmark, which measures floating-point performance; 10 percent slower than the Pentium 4 in integer performance, but 21 percent faster in the floating-point benchmark. But when using a dual-processor configuration, two G5s edged out two 3.06-GHz Xeon DP processors by 3 percent running SPECint, and 41 percent faster under SPECfp, tallying a 15.7 score.

“In real world tests and in SPEC tests we can clearly say we have caught up with the PC and passed them with the fastest computer in the world,” Jobs said.

Correction: The G5 will run at 3-GHz 12 months from now, Jobs said; according to Apple, the processors of the different Apple models will run at different bus speeds. A previous version of this story also misstated the version of the GCC compiler used.

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